Seattle is a good advertisement for the United States. It’s different, tolerant and yet quite bloody-minded when it wants to be. After 9/11, someone tried to set fire to the city’s mosque. Thereafter, for night after night, locals mounted a vigil outside the building. They were Catholics and Baptists, radicals and conservatives. I don’t suppose many Seattleites would have been surprised, much less objected.

This is the most literate city in the US, has the highest number of college graduates and instinctively zigs when the rest of the country zags. It’s a city whose presiding geniuses are Kurt Cobain (the late frontman of Nirvana) and Frasier. Yet before we start portraying the place as a Pacific Islington, remember that it also houses and nurtured two of the biggest forces of global capitalist uniformity: Microsoft and Starbucks.

Of course, I’m assuming the writer knows Frasier Crane, unlike Cobain, was just a character on a TV show.

It’s here, among the yoga-toned and the orthorexic, the fathers with papooses and the mothers with campaigns, that you get a glimpse of real Seattle: an enterprise founded on conviction and principal.

And if global megacorps have to come from somewhere, you’d rather it were here. Bill Gates is giving half his money away and his father has written a book on why accumulated fortunes should be taxed. In Dallas or San Diego they could happily sit on their growing mountains of cash. Around here, they couldn’t look the neighbours in the eye.